Shìè yīhuà 士諤醫話
Shi’e’s Discussions of Medicine by 陸士諤 Lù Shìè (Republican-period Sōngjiāng / Shànghǎi scholar-physician and novelist; 1878–1944), with modern punctuation and collation by 王君慧 Wáng Jūnhuì.
About the work
A Republican-period yīhuà (medical talks) in the late style — single-author casebook-with-discussion arranged in numbered talks, each headed by a topical title (e.g. “Rìběn Hànyī fùxīng jì” 日本漢醫復興記 — “Account of the Revival of Chinese Medicine in Japan”). Lù Shìè 陸士諤 brings to the genre two distinctive features: (i) his clinical engagement with the Sino-Japanese / Sino-Western medical situation of the 1920s–1930s, including extensive reporting on the Kō-Kan i-gaku 皇漢醫學 revival movement in Japan, on Western practitioners (such as Dr. Watanabe Hiroshi 渡邊熙) who took up Hàn medical practice, and on the new Tōyō-igaku-kai 東洋醫道會 organisations; and (ii) his literary skill: Lù was one of Republican China’s most prolific popular fiction writers (his 1910 utopian novel Xīn Zhōngguó 新中國 is an early classic of Chinese science-fiction), and the yīhuà is correspondingly rich in narrative and rhetorical texture. The text is divided into individually-titled “talks” (e.g. Shìè yīhuà yī, èr … 士諤醫話一、二…) and embeds full case-records with diagnostic notes, prescriptions, and editorial comment by the modern collator.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source compresses Lù’s frontmatter and main text into a single _000.txt file. The text opens with the topical talk on the revival of Hàn medicine in Japan, which is itself the de facto programmatic preface to the collection. Lù celebrates the fact that Japanese Western-trained physicians have grown disenchanted with the limits of Western therapy and turned to study Chinese medical books, that the Japanese revivalist movement has secured legal recognition for Hànyī practitioners, that the journals Hànfāng yǔ Hànyào 漢方與漢藥 and HuángHàn yīyào zázhì 皇漢醫藥雜誌 are circulating widely, and that German Dr. med. Watanabe Hiroshi 渡邊熙 has hung out his shingle in Japan as a HuángHàn physician.
Abstract
Lù Shìè 陸士諤 (1878–1944) was a Qīngpǔ 青浦-born Sōngjiāng / Shànghǎi physician of the Republican period, also a celebrated novelist. The Shìè yīhuà is one of his clinical-doctrinal compilations, addressed to a literate non-specialist readership. Modern editions (the hxwd edition is one) are based on Lù’s Republican-era printings, with the present punctuated and collated edition by Wáng Jūnhuì 王君慧.
Three interlocking themes structure the text: (i) Sino-Japanese-Western medical politics — Lù is acutely aware of the contemporary Republican-era Chinese medical guóyī 國醫 movement and frames the legitimacy of Chinese medicine partly through the Japanese revival; (ii) clinical pedagogy through casework — long-form case narratives drawn from Lù’s own Sōngjiāng practice, often spanning multiple consultations and including the àn 案 (diagnostic note) and fāng 方 (prescription) for each visit, with retrospective discussion; (iii) editorial-collator dialogue — Wáng Jūnhuì’s modern collation appends critical notes (校者注 / 校者以為…) that engage Lù’s choices, e.g. on the merits of the bitter-cold Huángqín / Huánglián opening versus an aromatic huàzhuó alternative for shīwēn (damp-warm) presentations. Composition window 1930–1944 reflects the dating of the dated content and Lù’s death year. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Shì-è yī-huà located. For Lù Shì-è as physician-novelist and the Republican Shàng-hǎi medical milieu, see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014); for the Sino-Japanese Kō-Kan / Huáng-Hàn medical politics of the 1930s see Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse (Chicago, 2014); for Lù’s fiction and the Shàng-hǎi early-SF milieu see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor (Stanford, 1997).